Rebuild Centec 2B

[Graham Horne 2Participant @grahamhorne2]

Eventually I got the Centec mill disassembled into main component parts, bearings out and stripped back to bare castings. The vertical head and knee lift was coated with some crinkly black finish to hide the rough state of the castings. A few hours with a carbide die grinder and the castings are looking ok ready for final rough sand and rotary wire brush then degrease and wash with thinners before 2 x brushed coats of epoxy filler primer. Then a sanding the castings to smooth followed by 2 more coats of sprayed epoxy filler primer with a gauge coat for a final pre-paint sand. Finally 2 x coats of 2k sprayed paint. So hopefully the castings will look as good or if not better than original.

As I reassemble I going to give some attention to the ways which is the reason for this thread. I have a largish surface plate (600×450) as I want to scrape the ways to remove the years of wear. The main column ways have a few dings so I will stone those back to clean. Clearly the knee raiser ways were hand scraped to the main column originally. I’m hoping to not need to do any (or much) work on the main column.

I know I have work to do on the table slides and the cross slide. To remove movement play with the gibs meant they either too loose or too tight in different spots because of wear. I’ve got most of tools I need for this but I need a dovetail straight edge to print for scraping. I am struggling to find one to buy and got to thinking there must be plenty out there that engineers don’t need all the time but also don’t want to get rid of either. A bit like my engineers level that sits in its box but I still don’t won’t to sell it (my kids will do that). Maybe I thought if someone has one that’s not too far away they may want to rent the straight edge too me for few weeks so I can complete this job of scraping the ways. Of course I am only using it print blue on the ways as I scrape them flat.

So my ask is if you of someone you know wants to sell or rent a dovetail straight edge to allow me to complete this project? I am near Daventry/Coventry area.

 

 

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